THE GOOD LIFE

Getting the right nutrients into your body every day is the key to high energy, disease prevention and even mental health, says nutritionist Ben Warren.

If you like to squeeze every hour you can out of your day, getting up before sunrise for your morning routine or exercise, and staying up late to catch up with friends or a new series on Netflix, nutritionist Ben Warren has a caution for you.

“These days, we tend to burn the candle at both ends because we want to enjoy our lives and be active. But our metabolic pathways need nutrients to run, and the harder you push your metabolic pathways, the more nutrients they need to run properly,” he says.

That – among other factors – means that nutrient deficiencies are almost ubiquitous today, even in people dedicated to living a healthy lifestyle. Although low-level deficiencies usually don’t have immediate symptoms, over time they can increase the risk of chronic disease, sap energy, affect hormone production and even contribute to poor mental health.

Originally aiming for a career as a professional golfer Ben became a nutritionist after learning that a lasting back injury was – to his astonishment – being aggravated by a dairy intolerance.

I thought, “This is incredible. How did I not know that the food I’m eating had such an impact on how I’m feeling?” After completing a Master of Science in Holistic Nutrition at Hawthorn University, British-born Ben set up his own clinical service, BePure, in New Zealand (home to his Kiwi-born wife), and launched a range of dietary supplements.

Through his clinical career, Ben has been constantly surprised to see how widespread nutrient deficiencies are. “Vitamin D is one that 84 percent of New Zealanders have been clinically shown to be deficient in. Iodine deficiency is another well-known one, especially now that more people are moving to natural salts. The government is looking at putting folic acid in bread to support pregnant mums, because even though during pregnancy it’s recommended for women to supplement with folic acid, many people aren’t doing that.”

Many people are also low in selenium, iron, zinc, which is heavily used by the body and the essential fatty acid Omega 3, says Ben. “Modern-day farming is stripping the minerals out of the soil and we’re not paying farmers enough to put trace minerals back into the soil. In New Zealand, our soils are deficient in selenium, iodine and a number of other trace elements.”

To meet nutritional needs, Ben recommends a “food first” approach, meaning a fresh, varied whole foods

diet, ideally organic to avoid chemical pesticides and herbicides. “That means meat or nuts every day for selenium, seaweed every day for the iodine, liver every day for the Vitamin D, sardines every day for the Omega 3 and so on,” he says.

Cooking food correctly – by steaming rather than boiling (which leaches nutrients) and cooking quickly to retain as many nutrients as possible – also helps. “I don’t believe we should eat all our food raw, although for many foods the most nutrients are contained in the raw state,” says Ben. “But some nutrients, like lycopene that you find in tomatoes and the beta-carotene in carrots, become more available to our bodies when you cook them.”

Cooking quickly, at lower temperatures, and with minimum water wastage also helps with nutrient preservation. Vitamins B and C are water-soluble, and vitamins, A, D, E and K are fat-soluble, meaning that if you boil or poach foods and pour off the water, or run off juices from grilled meats you’re losing valuable nutrients. Retaining cooking liquids, and saving juices from meats helps reduce the loss.

If getting all the nutrients required to run a busy lifestyle through diet alone sounds like a hard ask, that’s because it is, says Ben, who grows much of his own family’s food on his 15-acre farm. “I tried to get everything through diet for a couple of years, actually, but once I became trained in nutrition I realised it really isn’t possible.”

Ben recommends first identifying nutrient deficiencies through testing, treating them with an intensive short course to restore levels, and then maintain levels with a daily high-quality multivitamin. “Julia Rucklidge at the University of Canterbury is doing really interesting work treating mental health conditions with multivitamins. She says that if everyone just took a high-quality multi-vitamin, it would make a big difference to our country’s overall mental health.”